For nearly three hours, Brett Williams' 24 teen-age rocket-designers faced one tough question after another from some of NASA's most experienced aerospace engineers.

But the outcome was no smackdown of Generation Y.

The polite juniors and seniors from Fredericksburg High didn't falter before their interrogators and methodically detailed their plans to build and launch a Red Bird rocket this spring.

At the end of the design review session, the graying space agency engineers, some with experience dating back to the Apollo era, praised the poise and talent of the youths — a few of whom may find a career at the space agency in the years ahead.

"I'd have given my right arm to be in a class like this," said Lee Graham, a 25-year veteran of NASA's Johnson Space Center who leads the planning for a moon lander. "This is exactly what we need to inspire the next generations of engineers and scientists."

Williams, their 50-year-old teacher, is recognized as a trailblazer today. But 15 years ago, he left his job as a marine researcher in Galveston and became a teacher in the Hill Country tourist town of 10,000. One of the reasons for the career change, he said, was that he had grown frustrated over the lack of initiative shown by young engineers who had just graduated from college.

"I was amazed," Williams recalled. "Even after college, they behaved like they were in high school, where they expect everything to be laid out for them, follow it and get paid."

At Fredericksburg High, Williams became the driving force behind a curriculum that offers juniors and seniors the opportunity to design, build and launch rockets under the supervision of a teacher who guides but doesn't issue orders.

Most of the youths grew up in the state's most picturesque region, the children of ranchers and of shopkeepers who depend on the tourism industry.

For some of them, the 12-year-old program has become a stepping stone to college, a degree and a job in some field of engineering. Others choose law or medicine. Still others attend trade schools.

Twenty-three Texas high schools, five of them from the Houston area, now offer to about 1,000 students Williams' state-approved SystemsGo curriculum, administered by a nonprofit organization called Ignite Education. Four other states have expressed an interest in adapting the rocket-science course that shuns lectures and other traditional classroom techniques.

Williams supervises but otherwise expects the students to find and apply the fundamentals of spaceflight to their own designs. The youths gain hands-on experience as they turn from weeks of research and design to the fabrication and assembly of an unmanned spacecraft.

The program lasts the entire school year, and students who enter the course as juniors can return in their final high school year and advance to more sophisticated projects. Each spring, the payoff comes when they gather south of Fredericksburg to launch their creations.

They face tough scrutiny

Fifteen students under Le's supervision are working on the program's entry-level goal, a rocket that can soar to an altitude of one mile with a 1-pound payload.

Under the SystemsGo initiative, the students start with one of three performance goals. The teens use that goal rather than a pre-existing blueprint to devise the design of their rocket.

As they gain experience, the students and their instructors turn their efforts to something more ambitious, like a rocket that can break the sound barrier or a spacecraft that can carry a 35-pound payload to an altitude of 100,000 feet — a challenging but not impossible goal.

So far, no class, including Williams' in Fredericksburg, has fired a rocket that has hit the 100,000-foot mark.

But that's what brought Williams' students to the Johnson Space Center earlier this month — an opportunity to let some of NASA's best engineers critique their design for a rocket that might be the first to meet that objective. During the lengthy session, the youngsters faced the same scrutiny NASA's own experts undergo when they design a spacecraft.

The focus was on an equation-filled computer model for the Red Bird 12, a rocket the Fredericksburg students hope to build and launch from New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range next spring.

"There is so much riding on these numbers," said Greg Netherland, a senior who parked himself behind a laptop computer to do most of the speaking for his fellow students.

The session grew stressful, he later acknowledged, when the pros found problems with the students' calculations for aerodynamic drag, for the spacecraft's mass and for other issues.

As Netherland ran and re-ran the flight simulations on his laptop, the Red Bird 12's maximum altitude dropped from 100,000 feet to 80,000, and at one point to a mere 20,000 feet.

NASA helps 'get it straight'

In the end, the questions enabled the students to iron out all of the equations, and the craft's predicted performance returned to 100,000 feet.

"It's tough to see the numbers go up and down the way they did," said Netherland, who has already been accepted to Texas A&M University — Williams' alma mater — where he plans to study mechanical engineering.

Joanna Folse, a Fredericksburg senior and one of six women in the class, has also earned acceptance to Texas A&M, where she intends to study chemical engineering.

"I've never done anything so hands-on," Folse said of the session with the NASA engineers. "We had a general idea of what we wanted to do. They helped us get it straight."

Williams was silent for most of the session, insisting his students work among themselves to resolve the questions and respond directly to the engineers.

At Fredericksburg, he encourages students with vocational as well as wide-ranging academic interests to participate in the class.

"This is not a rocket club. It's not buying rockets from the hobby shop and launching them," said Carl Kotila, a 30-year NASA veteran now in his third year working with Williams' students.

"Some have no interest whatsoever in the math that makes a rocket work," he said. "But they love the plumbing, they like the electronics. Others are computer whizzes.

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